Farídu’d-Dín `Attár, a 12th century Sufi poet, wrote a mystical poem called the Conference of the Birds (my favorite translation is in prose, by S. C. Nott).
In this poem, several thousand birds decide to set out on a journey to their Immortal King, along an inward path fraught with difficulty. Guiding them is the Hoopoe, who tells of the stages of the journey in verse, and relates various allegories to help the birds comprehend the requirements of the journey.
By the end, all of the birds perish but thirty, who barely make it to the doorstep of the King. But that part of the tale I leave to the reader…
How this story connects to my recent thoughts comes in the fifth of the seven valleys of the journey: the Valley of Unity. Since this is a mystical station I am trying very hard to understand right now, I decided to go back and read what the Hoopoe said about it, and found these lines:
In this valley everything is broken in pieces and then unified. All who raise their heads here raise them from the same collar. Although you seem to see many beings, in reality there is only one – all make one which is complete in its unity. Again, that which you see as a unity is not different from that which appears in numbers. And as the Being of whom I speak is beyond unity and numbering, cease to think of eternity as before and after; and since these two eternities have vanished, cease to speak of them. When all that is visible is reduced to nothing, what is there left to contemplate? …
The day will come when the Sun will draw aside the veil which covers it. So long as you are separate, good and evil will arise in you, but when you lose yourself in the sun of the divine essence they will be transcended by love. While you loiter on the road you will be held back by faults and weaknesses…
When the spiritual traveller enters this valley he will disappear and be lost to sight because the Unique Being will manifest himself; he will be silent because this Being will speak.
The part will become the whole, or rather, there will be neither part nor whole. In the School of the Secret you will see thousands of men with intellectual knowledge, their lips parted in silence. What is intellectual knowledge here? It stops on the threshold of the door like a blind child. He who discovers something of this secret turns his face from the kingdom of the two worlds. The Being I speak of does not exist separately; everyone is this Being, existence and non-existence is this Being.